The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) group is in the news again, surprising climate change skeptics with results from a new study that shows the earth has warmed 2.5 °F over the past 250 years, and 1.5 °F over the past fifty years, and that "essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases." Dr. Richard Muller, who heads the BEST team, now considers himself a "converted skeptic," which he wrote about in a New York Times op-ed on Saturday:

"Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."

Not only is the lead scientist of the project a former climate change skeptic, BEST itself is funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, an organization that is rooted deep in the oil industry and the manufactured doubt industry. Two years ago a report found that the Koch brothers outspent Exxon Mobile in science disinformation at a whopping $48.5 million since 1997. Despite the special interest of their funders, BEST has made it clear, both on their website and in the results they've come to, that funding sources will not play a role in the results of their research, and that they "will be presented with full transparency."

Figure 1. The BEST surface temperature reconstruction (black) with a 95% confidence interval (grey). The overlying curve (red) is a curve fit to the temperature reconstruction based on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and volcanic activity.

Muller's research comes to essentially the same conclusion as similar well-known studies on the topic of global temperature rise. It attempts to address the question of attribution—how much has the globe warmed, and what is to blame? They found that solar activity relates very little to the fluctuations in temperature over the past 250 years, and that the warming is "almost entirely" due to greenhouse gas emissions, combined with some variability from volcanic eruptions. It's important to note that while Muller and his team found warming of 2.5 °F over the past 250 years, and 1.5 °F over the past fifty years, the IPCC did not find quite that much warming in their AR4 assessment.

BEST was in the news in October when they released results from their first independent study of surface temperature, which set out to address some common skeptic concerns about previous temperature reconstructions (e.g. NASA, NOAA, and HadCRU), including the urban heat island effect and the potential "cherry picking" of data. Both of these concerns were found to be non-issues. BEST concluded that the urban heat island effect does not contribute significantly to the land temperature rise. In fact, in their new study, they were able to reproduce the warming trend using nothing but rural stations.

BEST Part II doesn't necessarily bring anything new to the science as it currently exists; we've known for decades that the planet is warming and the cause is manmade. But in this case the scientific process played out the way it should: a skeptic of a certain scientific result took on the project, and was open and willing to accept whatever result the science gave him. We now have another batch of results in the group of well-known temperature reconstructions, funded by big-oil-interests, that tells us the planet is warming and that the cause is fossil fuel emissions.

Quoting MAweatherboy1:If you want to talk about the tropics so bad make your own blog on them... I'm not saying I wouldn't have liked to hear Angela or Dr. Jeff's input on the potential storm but last time I checked this is their blog and they can write whatever they want.

And they are very consistent in their GW posts... Here are some of them for this month...

Since we are on the topic of global warming, i myself don't believe the hype.... the earth has warmed many times in its life, millions of years of heating and cooling. It's a process that is a part of why we even exist. If the earth never warmed after the ice age we would never exist. Get use to it.....

Quoting weathermanwannabe:Thank You Ms. Fritz. Only makes sense. Fossil fuels (coal, oil, etc) are buried deep underground for a reason; Mother Earth already recycled these elements over millions of years. Now in the past 100 years, Man has unearthed it and reintroduced it back into the atmosphere at alarming "un-natural" rates in a very short time span during industrialization....Something's Gotta Give.

Quoting MAweatherboy1:If you want to talk about the tropics so bad make your own blog on them... I'm not saying I wouldn't have liked to hear Angela or Dr. Jeff's input on the potential storm but last time I checked this is their blog and they can write whatever they want.

And I'm sure there'll be a post soon on tropical weather.

I have to say, living in Australia, I'm very jealous of all the resources you guys have for watching the weather. Being able to pull up maps showing moisture, shear, vorticity, etc is pretty cool, not to mention seriously educational!

Quoting MAweatherboy1:If you want to talk about the tropics so bad make your own blog on them... I'm not saying I wouldn't have liked to hear Angela or Dr. Jeff's input on the potential storm but last time I checked this is their blog and they can write whatever they want.

Quoting MAweatherboy1:If you want to talk about the tropics so bad make your own blog on them... I'm not saying I wouldn't have liked to hear Angela or Dr. Jeff's input on the potential storm but last time I checked this is their blog and they can write whatever they want.

Yes, they can post on what they want and whatever they post about then we can post anything relevant to the post or about the tropics.

Quoting Svfortuna:I don't want to dispute the fact that the world is slowly heating, but is there absolute empirical evidence that human beings are causing it - or is it a earth cycle which has been repeated countless times in the history of the earth.

That's a good question, and the answer is:Yes, there is.

We know roughly how much fossil fuels humans have dug/drilled up and burned. The amount of extra CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere over the past few hundred years is *less* that what we've emitted, so nature is soaking some up.

We also know that atmospheric Oxygen concentration has dropped over the past few hundred years, in direct proportion to the amount of fossil fuels burned.

We know that the new carbon is not from plants, because it has extremely low radio-carbon levels, meaning it's been buried for a very long time. We also know that it *once* came from plants, because of the Carbon-12/13 ratio (plants preferentially take up Carbon-12, and the Carbon-13 ratio in the atmosphere has been dropping lately).

We know that the warming is caused by this extra CO2, because we can actually measure it - changes in the amount of heat escaping from the earth can be measured by high-altitude aircraft and satellites, and both show a decrease. We can also measure the heat coming back down from the atmosphere in CO2 bands, and it's increasing.

We also know a great deal about what other forces drive climate, and nearly every single one of them points to cooling, not warming.

TL;DR: We know it's us, because we've increased CO2 in the atmosphere, and we know of no natural phenomenon that can both exactly counter-act the known warming properties of CO2, while simultaneously causing a warming that's proportional to the amount of CO2 emitted.

Quoting MAweatherboy1:If you want to talk about the tropics so bad make your own blog on them... I'm not saying I wouldn't have liked to hear Angela or Dr. Jeff's input on the potential storm but last time I checked this is their blog and they can write whatever they want.

am %100 with you on that even no i dont like GW its there blog and they can talk about what evere they want

Totally agree, we finally get some model action and everything shifts to GW crap

If you want to talk about the tropics so bad make your own blog on them... I'm not saying I wouldn't have liked to hear Angela or Dr. Jeff's input on the potential storm but last time I checked this is their blog and they can write whatever they want.

07-27-2012 10:52 BJT The platform will be based at the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange. The trials will involve 200 firms in 16 industries, such as steel, petrochemicals, non-ferrous metals, and power and six non-industrial fields, such as airlines, ports, airports and hotels.

Scientists say these kinds of companies are responsible for approximately 110 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, or nearly half of the city’s annual emissions.

Zheng Dawei, head of Investment Banking Dept.,SPD Bank, said, "Carbon emissions trading treats carbon credits as merchandise that can be bought and sold. The companies will first be given initial quotas for carbon emissions for free, by Shanghai’s NDRC. The quotas are based on their historical emissions data. Any surplus or shortage of credits can be adjusted through transactions in the carbon credit market. "

Zheng says it’s imperative for China to establish a national carbon emissions trading market and then to join international efforts. China’s involvement in the international carbon market now is mostly through what’s known as the CDM, or Clean Development Mechanism. The way it works is that developed countries get a carbon reduction credit by investing in clean energy projects. But the CDM faces an uncertain future.

Zheng said, "The Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to combat climate change, gave birth to the CDM. However, the first phase of the protocol is due to expire at the end of this year. I think that’s also one of the reasons why China has to start its own carbon market next year. "

Beyond Shanghai, six other cities and provinces, Beijing, Tianjin, Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Guangdong and Hubei Provinces will be involved in the pilot project. And if all goes well, a nationwide system is scheduled to be in place by 2015. Zheng says that’s expected to help the national goal of a 17 percent reduction in carbon intensity by 2015.